Remember when you were an impressionable preteen and you made your parents park around the block so your friends didn’t bear witness to your dad’s dorky haircut and old station wagon or hear your mom bugging you about curfew? Or maybe it was your dweeby older sibling who constantly annoyed you about wanting to hang out with your friends and always inserted themselves into your life. This sometimes feels a lot like the relationship between television and digital.

Digital thinks television has this moth-ball infested, archaic persona and they want to stay away from being associated with it, but television is cooler than you think. It doesn’t have the recurring problems of fraud, frequency and lack of reach like digital does, so what gives? Television has always been and still is a reach powerhouse. TV ad spending rose 5% in February and doesn’t show signs of decline. Proof that television is still “hip.”

Webster defines television as “an electronic system of sending images and sounds by a wire or through space,” so doesn’t that include digital video too? Doesn’t that include VOD and OTT? Just because the platforms are fragmented, doesn’t mean the definition has to be just as complex.

We shouldn’t believe everything we read online, including the constant insistence that television is dead. It’s simply not true. Television is an experienced medium that all other mediums should want to be connected to.

Research has proven that sales decline when advertisers reduce television ad spending. This study reinforces our confidence that TV’s reach is the key ingredient to an effective advertising campaign, especially when looking to buy across screens. Though digital video spend is definitely increasing year-over-year, it’s still no match for television ad spending, which is predicted to hit a whopping 77 billion dollars by 2020.

At the end of the day, it’s all television. And now, with advanced advertising technology such as targeted and programmatic TV, television has turned into your dad in a man bun and a Tesla.